Mass ends, the lights come on, and thirty or so old women file out, smiling one after another at the twins. Che carini. Che belli.
Periodically, while Shauna was pregnant, a nurse would show us our sons on an ultrasound screen. A hand or two, the pressed ovals of the skulls, squashed limbs washing back and forth behind blizzards of pixels—it was as if we were peering at bizarre life-forms deep under the ocean. It seemed plain they would not be entirely human: they had fish feet, dark hollows for eyes. After two years of failing to get Shauna pregnant, I’d grown accustomed to thinking parenthood happened to other people, luckier people. I had never really believed it would work the way it was supposed to, not even after Shauna’s pregnancy tests came back positive; or after her twenty-week appointment when we saw the creature that would be named Henry lounging inside his amnion with his ankles crossed, Owen twisting in his own sac nearby; or even after Shauna was confined to bed and we were using phrases like pelvic floor and mucus plug in daily conversation.
Now—it has happened in an instant—the babies are nine months old and it’s our first Christmas as a family. And what amazes me, day after day, is that our sons are perfectly whole. I wait for them to transform back into undersea monsters; I wait for someone to come and take one of them away.
Tonight they do a sort of belly-crawl down the hallway like soldiers creeping beneath razor wire. Their eyes glitter. Their mouths gape with concentration.
Before bed, we lower them into the tub and pour cups of water over their heads. Their little diaphragms rise and fall beneath their ribs. They lean forward in their little plastic bath chairs and slap the surface of the water and crack each other up. Shauna looks over at me and says, “We have two children.”
Christmas morning: more rain. The four of us sit on a blanket beside our little ragged Christmas tree with its glass flowers and spill of gifts. Gifts for the boys, gifts from the States. The Italian ones are easy to find: wrapped gloriously. The Italians could wrap a used textbook and make it look like gold and frankincense.
My sister-in-law has sent homemade chocolate chip cookies, which reputedly are available in Rome, at a bakery in the Jewish quarter, but both times we have gone there it has been closed. I eat fifteen of them.
My publisher has sent me Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, and I spend the afternoon reading about mushrooms, how the stems and caps we eat are only fractions of the real organism. The vast percentage of any mushroom, it turns out, lives underground, in a network of extremely fine fibers, or hyphae, that prowl the soil gathering nutrients. A single cubic centimeter of dirt might contain as much as two thousand meters of hyphae.
Rome is like that, I think. The bulk of it lies underground, its history ramified so densely under there, ten centuries in every thimbleful, that no one will ever unravel it all.
By dinnertime rain is smashing into the shutters. The thunder is soft enough that we’re not quite sure it’s thunder at all. We eat pork and tomatoes with mozzarella. Owen rolls off his blanket, brings his knees up under his chest, and crawls across the kitchen floor, one hand, two hands, one knee, two knees, as if he has been crawling all his life. “My God,” Shauna says, and drops her fork. He looks up at us, grinning.
We give them baths. We set them in their cribs. Owen rolls over and over, a little hurricane, throwing himself against the slats.
Maybe being a new parent is like moving to a foreign country. There is a Before and an After, an Old Life and a New Life. Sometimes we wonder who we were before. Sometimes we wonder who we are now. Sometimes our feet get tired. Sometimes we find ourselves reaching for guidebooks.
We are humbled over and over—humility hangs over our heads like a sledgehammer. Oh, your novel got a nice review? That’s great. You can read it after you scrub the feces out of your child’s pajamas. Oh, you think you’ve been here long enough to barter at the street markets? Guess what, you just spent €8 on three plastic clothes hangers.
Every few days there are moments of excruciating beauty. We are simultaneously more happy and more worn out than we have ever been in our lives. We communicate by grinning and pointing and waving food in the air. We don’t sleep as well as we used to. Our expectations (today I might take a shower; the #75 bus might actually show up) are routinely dashed. Just when we think we have a system (two naps a day; Shauna finds a rosticceria with chickens on spits that is open on Sundays), the system collapses. Just when we think we know our way around, we get lost. Just when we think we know what’s coming next, everything changes.
On the day after Christmas all four of us wake up ravaged by viruses. A deepwater pressure pounds in the space behind my nose, and pain drags through the bottoms of my eyes. Shauna can barely get out of bed. Henry stares glumly into space. Owen has it the worst. He sits on his mat and coughs like an old smoker. Twin cascades of phlegm stream down his upper lip. The coughs come in threes and he lowers his head and rakes the mitts of his hands across his face.
It feels as if we have been locked in a trunk that is slowly sinking toward the sea bottom. Shauna measures medicine into droppers. I switch on the computer and read that an earthquake in Sri Lanka has killed two thousand people. Fifteen minutes later CNN says the earthquake was in India and Thailand and has killed five thousand. Then ten thousand.
We drink foul-tasting Italian cough syrup. In the afternoon I fall asleep and have several consecutive nightmares that I will accidentally kill the boys. I bring Henry into the building, grappling with too many sacks of groceries, and drop him on the stairs. Owen rolls off the sawhorses and plank we use as a diaper table and crashes into the bathtub. I hold Henry on the terrace and he plummets off; I hold Owen in the window to show him a bird and he falls out.
I wake shivering. By dinnertime, the earthquake’s toll is up to twenty-five thousand and the Vatican radio station is calling it a tsunami. Tsunami: Japanese for “harbor wave.”
That night we hardly sleep. We are hot, we are cold. Sweat gathers in our clothes. We wipe our noses; we lie in the darkness with trees growing in our foreheads.
Somewhere in Iraq a British army sergeant is killed. Somewhere on the white beaches of Indonesia a thousand bodies start to rot. Around two in the morning I check on Owen in his crib. He is wide awake, not crying. His hair is stringy and clings to his forehead. When I change his diaper, his chest is pale, his forearms cool. His temperature is 102 degrees Fahrenheit. In the morning he starts coughing and does not let up, sets of three coughs followed by cries. We rush him around the apartment, showing him various toys, trying to get the fit to stop. For twenty-five minutes he does not stop coughing except to inhale. Eventually Shauna unplugs the telephone and lets him poke the buttons, which calms him for a moment. He sits over the phone, his torso rocking gently back and forth. I can hear him breathing from across the room.
“It’s just a cough,” I tell Shauna. “Just a fever.”
But how do we know, for sure, that he is not trapped in the fist of a fatal illness? All of a sudden, it seems, the shadow of apocalypse has crept across everything. The tsunami death toll climbs like a deficit counter: eighty thousand, ninety thousand. I can’t take my eyes off the computer screen: trees stuffed through rooftops, orphans weeping in tents. A hotel restaurant fills with brown water. A floating log, draped in fabric, sweeps backward between buildings.
“Shut it off,” Shauna says. “That’s enough.”
I watch it again. The log is not a log. It is not a log.
A giant basaltic plate, grinding across the surface of the earth at a speed roughly comparable to the rate at which our fingernails grow, smashes into another plate, and the resulting percussion sends waves to drown a hundred thousand people.
A hundred thousand. Half the population of Boise. Is that everybody I know? Everybody I’ve ever met? Even one hundred thousand is too big to fully understand.
The pediatrician rides a Vespa. “All of Rome is sick,” he says, and washes his hands in our sink for three minutes. He says the boys need rest, hot
steam, more cough syrup. Before he leaves, he asks if he can borrow a tissue.
Owen sits dazed on his mother’s lap, medicine working on him, virus working on him, all his shining, young cells fighting. I go to the studio and open a notebook and write, Wind rattles the pane. Are you afraid? That’s as far as I get. I spend the rest of the morning watching video clips of devastated villages. The death toll passes 150,000.
Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. And another. And another.
Rain taps the window. Is this what it’s like living in the twenty-first century? My friend Al writes, “Start gathering animals. I’ll prepare the ark.” I think, I should start keeping an ax in the corner of the bedroom.
To see our planet from space, you’d never know about all our human dramas, all these desperations being played out in our deserts and forests and wetlands, the earth a tin-derbox of sage and cheatgrass, thirty tectonic plates floating atop an asthenosphere of half-melted asphalt. The bright flares of human desires, the endless, unsympathetic swirling of oblivion. Here’s another duality of Rome: the way time here feels simultaneously immense and tiny. One day we are positively huge, at center stage. The next we are a snowflake, falling through the clouds, circling, dropping through the hole in the roof of a temple, alighting on the floor, and vanishing.
If the 4.5 billion years the earth has existed were represented by a soccer field, the hundred thousand years of human history since agriculture would be represented by an endline one-hundredth of an inch across—a margin no thicker than a blade of grass.
Fate is whimsy: I could be you, reading this page; you could be on a breakwater in Sri Lanka, or making dinner in your house in Pompeii, laughing with your daughter, five minutes left to live. Everywhere the world reminds us how little control we have, the wind tearing through your jacket, a little cluster of bacteria hiding in your hamburger.
To walk out a door or inhale or tie a shoe is to risk your life. You stoop; an invisible, silent bullet might just whiz past your head, or it might fly straight through your throat. Pliny and the ancients, with their circuses and mock naval battles and a first-century population with as many slaves as citizens seemed to understand this better than we do. Even the emperors, many of whom fancied themselves gods, could be made away with as cheaply as anybody else: a coughing fit, a plate of toxic mushrooms, a knife in the back.
On August 24, AD 79, Pliny the Elder was south of Rome, in the Bay of Naples, when smoke started rising from Vesuvius. He asked that ships be made ready and sailed for Stabiae, a seaside resort town near Pompeii. “Was he afraid?” wondered his nephew. “It seems not, as he kept up a continuous observation of the various movements and shapes of that evil cloud, dictating what he saw.”
The wind carried Pliny across the bay. Ash and pumice rained onto the decks. He made notes; he speculated on causes for the eruption. In Stabiae, he met with leaders, even took a bath. The buildings were shaking; ash billowed into the streets. He helped escort evacuees to the shore, but the sea had risen, and the wind had trapped their boats. According to his nephew, Pliny took refuge in the shade of a sail, asked for some cool water, and asphyxiated as two slaves tried to help him up.
It’s hard not to think of Pliny’s nephew, seventeen years old, back at Misenum, staring across the bay, wondering about the fate of his uncle. The distant ash, the blue sky beyond. What’s the difference, I wonder, between those of us who sit and watch, and those of us who sail across the bay? Can curiosity be a form of courage?
“As a protection against falling objects they put pillows on their heads tied down with cloths,” Pliny’s nephew wrote. “Elsewhere there was daylight by this time, but they were still in darkness, blacker and denser than any ordinary night.”29
On New Year’s Eve I drink beer with some of the other fellows on the roof of the Academy. Shauna is still sick, the boys are finally recovering, sleeping in their cribs, and I have not added more than a few new pages to my war novel in weeks. The moon rises over the Alban Hills huge and lopsided and red. Ten minutes before midnight, fireworks begin streaking into the sky from every neighborhood, the historic center, Trastevere, the suburbs, the Castelli Romani in the distant hills—little flowers of green and red, a thousand muted booms. January: month of Janus, Roman god of gates and archways, god of transitions, god of middle grounds. He watches over the borderland between country and city, watches over harvests and births; he is the mascot of the American Academy, and the Janiculum is named for him.
Somewhere in Indonesia cars are still trapped in trees and people sleep stupefied in debris, and here in Rome spent rockets are kicked to the gutters and Peter Pan flies through the Piazza del Popolo and the shadows of figures walk the Janiculum in front of the Academy, holding hands, peering up at us, then down at the city.
On the way home I pause on the front stairs. A carving of Janus presides over the Academy’s entrance, one face on the front of his head and another on the back. Above the roofline, the undersides of the clouds flash copper. To my right is Jon Piasecki’s studio, bristling with carved stumps and painted branches and stones with holes drilled in them. To my left is George Stoll’s studio, impeccably clean, all white, a half dozen fastidiously polished plaster bowls sitting on tables.
Ten feet above me, Janus peers at George’s studio and Jon’s, at Trastevere and the Vatican, at the past and the future. More dialectics; more sets of twins.
Lorenzo is gone for the night. I have to clamber over the six-foot wall beside the front gate to get home. The sparks of a firework drift slowly down over the pines.
I hate seeing my kids sick. When you’ve never seen them recover before, you’re not quite convinced they can do it.
On the fourth of January my second book comes out in the UK and my publisher flies me to London. The Alps drift along far below—shining with snow, creased everywhere. In the lavatory the tissues are labeled Tissues and the flusher says Press here to flush. The flight attendant greets me with a “Buongiorno,” then asks, in perfect English, “What would you like to drink?”
Rather than feel comforted, I am disappointed. It is the same chagrin I feel when I overhear American tourists in Rome say something like “Oh, I’ve been to St. Kitts.” I am one of them, hardly more than a tourist myself, but to go to London and be spoken to in English, to be able to eavesdrop on conversations again, after a season and a half of being surrounded by Italian, feels like cheating. As if life should not be so automatic, as if we Americans ought always to be reminded of this.
Shauna will be putting the twins down for their morning nap by now. I think of Owen belly-crawling this morning on the wooden floor of the Academy’s living room, Shauna and I sitting on the antique trunk outside the bar, sipping latte macchiati, Owen’s small body sliding across the wood, his palms dragging him to a dropped spoon, the fireplace, his mother’s shoelace. He runs his fingers over the carved face of the trunk; he shrieks in delight.
“A second birth,” Maria Montessori called it, when a child can move away from his mother on his own. And indeed Owen does seem like a new child, rarely crying, constantly at work on getting himself somewhere else.
Now the slow shaking of another 767, the big, dead television monitors, the flight attendants plying their carts. France is consumed in white vapor. The sky floats away. I return fifty hours later. Monteverde is busy and dark. There’s the newsstand, the pizzeria, the corner bar, son at the cappuccino machine, father at the register, both wearing paper hats. They whisk past: there, then gone. It is strange to race in the back of a taxi through these fifteen or so blocks, the confines of our daily life—which I have known before now only on foot—in under a minute.
I run up the stairs into the apartment but everybody is asleep. I peek in at Henry and Owen, then bring a cup of tea onto the terrace. There are a few stars. My breath drifts away in white clouds. How urbane and modern London seemed, with its pale faces and straight avenues and fast food and cheerses and pardons and loos. London is old, of course, but coming
from Rome it felt refurbished and youthful; it was not so burdened with cracking and crumbling, not so dusky and battered. Starbucks and KFC glowed on street corners. All the menus were in English, all the signs intelligible. But here? In Rome I could live twenty years and never be sure I hadn’t missed some hugely important, tree-lined avenue ten blocks from our apartment. It is the puzzle of Rome that mesmerizes: its patience, its stratigraphy, Tiber mud gumming up the past, wind carrying dust from Africa, rain pulling down ruins, and the accumulated weight of centuries compacting everything tighter, transubstantiating all stones into one.
Tonight, for some reason my brain can almost fit itself around the fact that the universe is expanding, time and space blowing outward, our galaxy swirling wider and wider, the faint starlight shining on this terrace older than the founders of Rome, older than the dinosaurs, traveling from stars some of which have long since collapsed and exploded, leaving behind carbon shells, smoldering and impossibly heavy.
And yet there they are, gleaming away, signal lights shining out of the past.
Days of scarves and parkas. Days of too many items in too many pockets—one bottle of milk in one back pocket, another in the other. Pen, wallet, phrase book, keys; a blanket for the boys over a shoulder; notepad and money clip; the baby carrier strapped over my chest with Henry inside; Owen wriggling in my left arm, his fingers in my hair, chin hauling back—he becomes an angry wolverine. A stamped letter for the postbox is clamped in my teeth. A recycling bag jammed full of paper hangs from one wrist. Do I have a pacifier? Rain shield for the stroller?
In the States, practically every time someone would stop us on the street or in the grocery store, they’d gesture at the stroller and say, “Twins? Bet you have your hands full.” They’d mean well, of course, but to be reminded of something you can’t forget is debilitating. I prefer the Italian mothers who lean over the stroller and whisper, “So beautiful,” the smiles of passing children, the old Roman who stopped us today and grinned at Henry and Owen before shaking my hand and saying, with a bow, “Complimenti.” My compliments.